Sunday, September 11, 2005

I've Created a Monster

My daughter.

Yesterday, we did chores together. Waxed the truck, raked the grass clippings off of our really big lawn (the grass was so long, it was ready for baling). She loves to help and is really quite cheerful about it -- in fact, one of her favorite chores is scrubbing the toilets.

"Please, Mommy, can I clean the potties?"

"I don't know, honey, have you been good today?"

Anyway....

Lately all she wants to do is tell stories. She'll usually start off with something real:

While waxing the truck -

Daddy told me about a man who never cleaned his truck. He never washed it or waxed it and there were mice living inside.

Okay - so far, so good. This is non-fiction. Then the fun begins -

The man took one of the mice and trained it! He taught it to fetch and to bite and to come when he called.

And the story went on from there - The New Adventures of Messy Man and his Attack Mouse.

Maybe she'll be the published author in our family instead of me. I can't complain. She reads and writes stories whenever she's bored. She doesn't own a Game Boy, and we don't own any sort of gaming system (I'm pretty sure that we're the only people on our street that don't, if not the only ones in our state!). She's only allowed one hour of T.V. each day (usually broken up into two half hours -- unless we watch Crocodile Hunter or Jeff Corwin). So, she doesn't have anything that interrupts her imagining.

I'm going to start paying closer attention to the stories she tells me. Maybe the plot for the next NY Times Bestseller is in there somewhere.